For years, AI simmered in the background—winning chess matches and sparking curiosity, but not much else. Then, seemingly overnight, boom! ChatGPT arrived, and suddenly, we weren’t just hearing about AI—we were all using it. Generative AI is now everywhere. It can create content, generate insights, and soon, with Agentic AI, its Large Language Models will evolve into Large Action Models, capable of triggering actions not just words. That leaves us with two big questions:
👉 How should businesses adopt AI to compete and win in this new era?
👉 And what about me: what happens to my job?
Intelligent Automation—like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) combined with Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)—is already transforming work by automating data-heavy, routine tasks. When combined with Conversational AI, the potential becomes extraordinary, enabling seamless automation from need identification to fulfilment
Enter Agentic AI: a new era of autonomous, goal-oriented systems that go beyond traditional automation. Unlike tools that follow predefined rules, Agentic AI leverages machine learning, reasoning, and context-awareness to make decisions, solve problems, and take proactive actions. For example, an AI agent in customer service can analyse data, anticipate needs, initiate follow-ups, and even escalate issues—becoming a decision-making collaborator rather than just a tool.
This isn’t about replacing humans—it’s about augmenting them. Intelligent Automation plus Agentic AI transforms digital workers from mere data processors to dynamic knowledge workers, proactively learning and contributing real value.
🔍 Lessons from My Journey: Military Doctrine, the Dotcom Boom, and Automation
My career—spanning the military, defence digitization, the dotcom boom, and automation—has shown me one thing: technology changes everything. Here are three lessons that apply as we navigate this new AI-driven world:
1. Agency and Autonomy
In the military, digitization revolutionised doctrine—the fundamental set of principles, strategies, and tactics that guide armed forces—particularly the culture of leadership. It unified data, made information widely accessible, decentralised decision-making, and empowered teams to take action.
Today, these same principles apply to business. AI and automation enable organisations to observe, orient, decide and act with unprecedented awareness and speed. By combining real-time insights with AI-powered automation, organisations can empower people to act decisively in fast-moving, competitive environments.
This isn’t about the machines taking over—it’s about people stepping up, empowered and augmented by AI tools to achieve more than ever before.
2. Systems Thinking: Integration and Orchestration
Automation has often been implemented too narrowly, addressing only discrete tasks within business silos. While this can deliver incremental gains, it overlooks the larger opportunity: connecting people, processes, and technologies across end-to-end workflows and extended networks.
By reimagining processes and applying AI-powered automation holistically, organisations can unlock significant, amplified benefits. Breaking down silos creates streamlined operations, enabling seamless customer journeys and highly efficient internal workflows. In the age of 21st-century technology, simply automating outdated 20th-century processes and structures falls short of the mark. The focus must shift from isolated tasks to enterprise-wide outcomes that deliver truly transformative performance improvements.
This is about making digital operations an enterprise asset by centralising the orchestration of digital workers into super-productive, highly-agile, digital workforces. It requires dynamic prioritisation to ensure SLAs are consistently met across the organisation while maintaining responsiveness to fluctuating demand patterns. This approach drives scalable, sustainable value across the organisation.
3. Human-Centred Design
AI and automation are changing the nature of work, requiring us to rethink how people fit into processes. Rather than placing humans in roles out of necessity—filling gaps between systems or technologies—we can now place them by choice. This shift allows us to take the robot out of the human, focusing instead on areas where ingenuity, problem-solving, and relationship-building skills create the most value, and doubling down on those strengths.
💡 The Challenge: As machines take over repetitive tasks and predictable decisions, how do people create value in a digital-first world?
The answer lies in investing in people and redefining roles that AI cannot replicate—such as judgment, creativity, empathy, lateral thinking, and the ability to build trusted relationships. For instance, in High Net Worth banking, clients rely on the expertise of dedicated relationship managers. If banks use lower cost self-service tools for routine interactions and robots for back-end operations, they could reinvest those savings into expanding relationship management services, ensuring all customers can receive a human touch when it matters most.
This is about redesigning work to maximise human potential. By leveraging AI-powered automation to handle repetitive routine tasks, businesses can elevate human roles to focus on what machines cannot achieve—delivering personalised, meaningful experiences and driving innovative solutions that create enduring value.
The Promise of AI: Efficiency AND Transformation
AI and automation isn’t just about working faster—it’s about working smarter. It’s an opportunity to reimagine how organisations operate, compete, and innovate.
By integrating AI agents and digital workers into cohesive systems, businesses gain agility, generate new insights, and can unlock entirely new value streams.
The Age of Agency is coming. Are you ready to seize the opportunities ahead?
👇 I’d love to hear your thoughts—how is your business preparing for the AI revolution?
